Text selection on modern touch devices, such as phones and tablets, can be difficult and tedious to complete. Often, the user knows what text they want to select on a displayed page, but need to spend time carefully refining their selection. For example, in one type of selection, a user taps a word to select the word. Once the word is selected, on-screen tools are displayed that allow the user to refine the selection. This is typically done by dragging slides that appear next to the text to add or subtract text to the selection. Once the selection is complete, the user can perform actions on the selected text.
If the user wants to select multiples areas of displayed text that are not contiguous, the user has to break up the selection into multiple separate selection tasks. For example, if a user wants to share a paragraph and a photo on a news article, unless the photo is embedded in the paragraph, it is not possible to select both the photo and the paragraph together.
A user may want to select more than a single word of displayed text, such as a few paragraphs of content. Because of the way that web pages are constructed, with advertisements frequently interspersed with the actual content of interest of a web page, this can be difficult to achieve. For example, many web pages with multiple paragraphs of content will imbed multiple ads and unrelated links on the web pages, making it difficult to select much text on the page without also selecting one or more ads.